Write (More) Effortlessly With Markdown

Markdown has arrived on WordPress.com! Some of you may respond with “Finally!” Others might be asking, “what’s that?” Markdown is a quick way to add formatted text without writing out any HTML.

Let’s take a closer look. Here is an example of how Markdown looks while editing a post:

This is how that same example looks in the Reddle theme after it’s converted to HTML:

Writing with Markdown

Markdown lets you compose links, lists, and other styles using regular characters and punctuation marks. If you want a quick, easy way to write and edit rich text without having to take your hands off the keyboard or learn a lot of complicated codes and shortcuts, then Markdown might be right for you.

For example, to emphasize a word, you just wrap it with an asterisk on both ends, like this: *emphasized*. When your writing is published, it will instead look like this: emphasized. Similarly, two asterisks denote strong text: **strong** will be become strong.

Want to see what else you can do? Take a look at the quick reference chart, which shows handy steps for creating links, lists, and other types of formatting.

Enabling Markdown on WordPress.com

To start using Markdown, go to Settings → Writing in your blog dashboard, check the box next to Use Markdown for posts and pages, and save.

When writing Markdown, make sure to use the Text Editor for the best results.

Getting into the Details

Markdown nerds (like me!) know there are a lot of variants out there. On WordPress.com, we’re using a slightly modified version of Markdown Extra1, with a tweak to allow fenced code blocks inspired by GitHub Flavored Markdown2.

For instance, you can write code examples quickly using backticks:

```css
.ninja {
visibility: hidden;
}
```

…which produces:

.ninja {
visibility: hidden;
}

Take a look at the Posting Source Code support page for a list of the syntax highlighting schemes that WordPress.com supports. More details are available on the Markdown support page, including steps for enabling it for your commenters as well.

Go Mobile

You can also write formatted text in Markdown from any of our great mobile apps. Just enable Markdown, install one of the apps, and write whenever inspiration strikes.

It includes footnotes, which I think are basically the best thing ever with which to indulge my penchant for glorious digressions that would otherwise muddy the main point. Did I ever tell you about the time…3↩

[edited for brevity] Yes, you can even have footnotes inside footnotes. ↩

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This might be the answer to my poem problem.
I got a complicated one– a while ago– on their forum. It was something like compose it all on a notebook-like thing & then transfer it to the new post form.

I want to make each verse line hanging indent so it wraps to (say) 10px from left. V.easy to do in Word or CSS but I’ve never managed it in WP. (I’ve never managed CSS in WP tho I’ve paid for the necessary upgrade – but that’s another story.)

This is great! One problem I noticed however pertains to the content as returned to API clients (including the official WordPress clients). The Markdown content appears to be converted to HTML for API clients instead of being left in original Markdown format. Is this something you would consider fixing? It would be best to have feature parity between the web interface and for API clients. Currently a post published in Markdown continues to be editable in Markdown through the web interface, but editing it from an API client forces it to be converted to HTML (or else laboriously reformatted as Markdown in the client before resubmitting.

To see this easily just try opening any Markdown published post from the WordPress iPhone app.

No worries, this is just another way to write for people who like different ways of formatting their text. It’s off by default and there’s nothing here that you need to understand. Still, the quick reference page might help shed some more light on the situation.

I signed up for wordpress about a week ago. I was disappointed to see it didnt support markdown. I wrote an email to support and they didnt even mention the feature was coming! I almost cancelled my account. But here it is!! WOOOHOOOO the experience is so much better!

LOL. This is how the first wordprocessors used to work decades ago (pre-wysiwyg). I remember having to type [bold] some bold text [bold]. Of course, with this you don’t have to chase down missing tags at the end of the phrase.

This is great! One gotcha is that, using the mobile app, when you edit a post that was written in Markdown, you get HTML back. However, the plugin (on a self-hosted WordPress.org site) Markdown on Save Improved manages to make it so that I only ever see Markdown in post editing, both on the site itself and using the mobile apps. Might be worth looking into how you could implement this!

For those whose advanced brains can grasp the information in this post and run with it – I salute you. Respect to writers whose fingers and toes do not curl up and die when they see the words ‘codes’ or ‘HMTL’. For people like me, it strikes a chord of dread that the next time I blog, a series of incomprehensible commands will be barked at me or strange configurations of letters I haven’t written will be appearing in my text box. I sincerely hope that this will not be the case, and that I can continue blogging in my Luddite fashion, with minimal tech and no clever HTML stuff. Over and out.

Question, Matt: If the Markdown option is selected now, might a post previously published that inadvertently used Markdown code be automatically changed? Will selecting the Markdown option affect posts already published?

Hey Joe, good question. Nothing will happen to previously published posts once you enable the option, until you go and make an edit. Even then, Markdown just leaves existing HTML as-is, so even editing will continue to behave as expected.

This might take a little getting used to, but I like having the markdown option for bullets/lists. Is there an easy way to create superscript using markdown? Until now I’ve been using for 1st, 2nd, etc.

This post didn’t explain anything except that there is some new something or other – could we have a post that shows what the hell you’d do with all this? None of the examples seemed to make any sense – surely there is someone at WordPress who hasn’t used markup before who could explain it to us.

^ if you post something where you quote somebody you can use the quote markdown instead of the function in the edit panel – same with the other markdowns. Basically it’s just a more handy way of using already existing (except for the footnote) functions.

Not a fan – I’m happy using the editor buttons and adding the odd bit of html when I need it. Markdown would mean more stuff to remember, and since different sites use different markdown versions I know my brain wouldn’t be able to handle this. (I’m very active on Google+ and there putting one asterisk each side of your text makes it bold, for example.) So thank you for making this optional, so I can carry on using WordPress the way I’m used to.

Thrilled to have Markdown available on WordPress.com sites. I first learned about Markdown when I used Textpattern years ago. One of the reasons I loved adding content in Textpattern. I know HTML, but love using Markdown. Thanks!

Hello Matt
Thank you for updating this option
But some formatting icons are already present in the visual editor …
Quote, strong, UL, Italic … Markdown let there them still active?
A conflict of choice c’d it be?
This experiment allowed me doubt
I much w’d like an icon ‘Markdown activation or not’ in the panel editor
Or simply a new editor enriched facilities Mardown!
Or a final integrated rich editor (dixit WinWord, …)
….. waiting more about

Markdown works well with HTML, you can mix and match them without any issues. People who enjoy writing with Markdown like it because they don’t need to click on any toolbars to do their formatting. It’s possible we’ll revisit that in the future but for now it’ll stay as-is.